MODERN THEATER
253
silent altar off to the side and out of the way of the padded kings repre–
sents a polite bow in the direction of the god, horned and suffering,
stuffed down the throat of his worshippers. Nor is there much doubt
that the ancient dithyramb, when young, sang the praises of the
slaughter. What
is
being challenged here is the idea that when a rite
of communion became a ritual of catharsis, its nature and purpose
could remain the same. Jane Harrison described the difference between
productive and presentational rites as follows: "The Greeks would say,
methectic [rather] than mimetic, the expression, the utterance, of a
common nature participated in, rather than the imitation of alien char–
acteristics." The purpose of all primitive communal rites, she points out,
is
to
overcome whatever distinction exists between the human and non–
human members of the group; they seek "to bridge the gulf that is just
opening, to restore by communion that complete unity which is just
becoming conscious of possible division."
It is in the light of this primitive belief in, and periodic affirmation
of, consubtantiality that we must interpret not only the Maenads' revels
but the contemporary theater. Dionysus is the god of forgetfulness. In
The Bacchae
Tiresias says that, filled with his "good gift, suffering
mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the
troubles of the day." The intoxication, literal and symbolic, that over–
flows Dionysus' wineskin is what has given
him
the name of
lusion,
lib–
erator: he brings ecstasy, one dances out of oneself, skips from the
brain's jailhouse. Boundaries crumble with a wave of his wand: first
the boundary between self and fellow man, so that the single corybante
becomes a congregation; and then the very idea of boundaries itself,
so that the distinction between self and other is obliterated and there
is reestablished the mystical union of mind and world, thought and
drifting cloud. The various elements of the ritual- the darkness, the
sensuality, the drunkenness, the exhaustion of the dance, the blinking-out
of consciousness, the sense of unity with each other and oneness with
the forces erupting within -lead the participants inevitably to a feeling
that Freud (elaborating a phrase of Romain Rolland) called oceanic, the
dissolving of the separate ego into the surrounding world as a grain of
salt
combines with the sea. This condition he ascribed to the return of
a primitive mechanism, omnipotence, the infant's inability to distinguish
between his mouth and his mother's breast, grasping finger and object
grasped, the wish as an abstract mental state and the concrete joy of
the wish come true. So too, with a narcissism no less dazzling, the Bac–
chantes merge the enormous energies they possess with the powers of
the earth that possess them. It is just this confusion between, on the
one hand, being inhabited by great forces and, on the other, inhabiting
